New voice-based International Remittance Service

A signal for further automation in banking has been sent, with news that Money2India application users are now able to send money to any bank in India via a voice command to Siri.

This development makes the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (‘ICICI Bank’) the first bank in the country use Apple's virtual voice assistant to enable cross-border remittances. ICICI is a multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

ICICI Bank’s voice-based international remittance service will enable non-resident Indians to send money from their resident countries to any bank in India. Any customer will be able to instantly trigger the emittance service to existing payees in India via a simple voice command to Apple's virtual voice assistant, Siri. This functionality works via an Apple iPhone or iPad.

The aim of new voice-activated service is to make customer convenience better and the use of the voice command replaces an existing five-step clicking and typing process.

For the voice-activated service to work, the customer needs to speak out the 'nickname' of the registered payee via an app called Money2India. An example given is for an imaginary customer speaking “Send $100 to Mom with Money2India” into the app, and this would be sufficient to trigger the transfer of funds.

This works by Siri converting the voice command to text via ‘Natural Language Processing’ and populates an interface for confirmation with the details. Natural Language Processing is a field of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, focused on the interactions between computers and human languages. To be effective, the artificial intelligence needs to understand and interpret speech recognition, language understanding, and connecting language phrases.

Once Siri has processed the commands, the software moves the request into the M2I app through the Siri payment API. The customer will still need to log in into the M2I app to confirm the auto-populated details about the transaction in order for the money to be sent.

With data security, the operation is secured by a two factor authentication parameter of device authentication and the secure login by the customer. The transaction operation happens within secure servers located within the ICICI Bank.

Commenting on the innovation, Mr. Vijay Chandok, who is the Executive Director of the ICICI Bank, stated: "At ICICI Bank, our philosophy is 'Ready For You. Ready For Tomorrow', wherein we are committed to offer innovative products and services to our customers at the fastest possible speed and with the highest level of convenience.”